Chapter Eighty-Seven: The River Diagram

That night, many things happened in Clear Summer City.

But in the heart of the Dragon Kingdom, the Imperial Capital, other things were stirring as well.

A dark-skinned man stepped out from a courtyard house with a hanging plaque over its gate.

Standing beneath the great banyan tree at the entrance to the yard, he smoked a cigarette in silence, replaying the contents of a secret meeting from earlier in his mind.

Even for a man who had spent decades rising and falling in the intelligence world, he could not help but feel a faint ripple in his heart.

"The Tokyo government is secretly joining forces with an extraordinary individual who appeared out of nowhere."

"His code name is Blood Angel."

"The current prime minister wants to cooperate with this extraordinary individual."

"Japan is plotting to expel the United States..."

These tangled threads of intelligence had not all been unearthed solely by covert assets planted in Japan; a large portion of them had, in truth, come from the Japanese government’s own quiet disclosure.

The man naturally understood this.

And the Dragon Kingdom was more than willing to let it be so.

In that earlier secret meeting, the highly distinguished figure presiding over it had set the tone even more bluntly:

"This is the beginning of a change."

Of course, the main subject of that meeting had not been those matters above.

Those broad matters of policy were not something the man was qualified to decide upon.

They had only been laid out so that he and the other participants might understand the relevant information, grasp the purpose of the coming actions, and know that what they would do in the future could very likely affect the fate of the nation, and even the world.

For within that secret meeting, the presider had issued a task to the man and the others:

To search for extraordinary individuals within the Dragon Kingdom.

Even if they could find only traces of them.

The man thought quietly, ground out his cigarette, and tossed the butt into the trash can nearby.

A black sedan of utterly unremarkable appearance slowly rolled up. The man opened the door and headed toward his predetermined destination.

...

It was not a particularly luxurious building.

But entering and leaving it required multiple layers of identity verification and the proper documentation.

The man arrived at the building, presented his identification papers, and, following the staff’s guidance, was led deep inside.

After putting on shoe covers, gloves, and an anti-static suit in a small room, he left the room and, according to instructions, walked down a long corridor. The ionized door slowly slid open, revealing the structure of the room before the man’s eyes.

It looked like a vast hollow chamber.

And at the very center of that chamber, rows upon rows of servers stood in the middle of the space, their humming never ceasing.

Beside the hall, a man wearing black-framed glasses saw him approach and nodded.

"Hello, Professor Luo. I am Jiang Cha'an from the Ninth Bureau."

The man greeted the bespectacled man.

"Mm, I know why you’re here."

The man known as Professor Luo by Jiang Cha'an turned around and looked at the rows of massive servers before him, nodding in response.

His badge displayed his identity and his name.

Person in Charge of the Fuxi Center, Luo Xing.

So this was Fuxi.

Standing beside Luo Xing, Jiang Cha'an looked at the servers before him with a touch of emotion.

This was his first time seeing the true face of a supercomputer.

After all, in the past he had only been one member of the Ninth Bureau, dealing every day with tangled and intricate intelligence matters. He had never laid eyes on such cutting-edge technology at the very peak of the world.

The Fuxi supercomputer.

At 129 pFLOPS, it ranked eighth among all supercomputers in the world and second in the Dragon Kingdom, meaning it could perform 129 quadrillion floating-point operations in a single second.

It was the newest supercomputer developed by the Dragon Kingdom.

Compared with Shenhu, the domestic supercomputer with the highest computing power, it was less famous among the public. But in truth, its importance was no less than Shenhu’s.

Because it carried two crucial functions.

First, as one of the multilayer backup carriers for the national database of the Dragon Kingdom;

Second, built upon the vast data of that database, it tirelessly nurtured the Dragon Kingdom’s most core general-purpose artificial intelligence, Luoshu, with its 129 quadrillion floating-point operations.

This was also the most important function of the Fuxi Supercomputing Center.

The research tool for the nation’s core artificial intelligence, Luoshu.

And now, Jiang Cha'an needed to make use of it.

"May we begin?" Jiang Cha'an asked Luo Xing.

"No problem. I already finished the preparations beforehand."

Luo Xing stood nearby with his arms folded and nodded. But for some reason, he then frowned and shook his head, a look of indescribable emotion appearing between his brows.

"...Does such a being really exist?"

He asked Jiang Cha'an in a low voice.

Because of the staff nearby, he deliberately kept his words somewhat vague.

But Jiang Cha'an could fully understand what he meant.

For a researcher who had spent his whole life dealing with the stable world of science, suddenly discovering that extraordinary individuals existed in this world, and that a supercomputer would need to be used to trace them, the feeling in his heart must be very strange indeed.

In fact, though he was not a scientist, Jiang Cha'an had a similar sense of strangeness.

But he strictly observed his duties, merely smiling faintly without saying anything.

Luo Xing had anticipated his reaction beforehand. His earlier remark had in truth not been meant to seek a response from Jiang Cha'an at all.

It was more like a quiet release of his own feelings.

So after shaking his head, he led Jiang Cha'an to the supercomputing center’s display interface.

The core parameters had already been set. On the display, the analysis of the video obtained from Japan had also been completed. From this point on, a unified supercomputing inference could be performed on the large databases within the Dragon Kingdom.

Jiang Cha'an looked at the screen. On Luoshu’s operating interface, one star point after another appeared, as though dense and countless stars were flickering in and out of sight.

"...What is that?"

Jiang Cha'an was curious, but did not ask aloud. He was highly sensitive to anything classified.

Yet Luo Xing seemed to understand his confusion. With great enthusiasm, he pointed at the display and explained to Jiang Cha'an.

"That is a conceptual map. Luoshu’s thought matrix is taking effect. In a mechanism beyond ordinary human understanding, it is selecting from the enormous archive of data those objects that may fit the requirements."

"Thought matrix?"

Seeing Luo Xing’s attitude, Jiang Cha'an sensed that this did not count as classified, so he asked softly.

Luo Xing nodded.

"You can understand it as the thinking mode of this supercomputer.

"But its thought is far more meticulous than a human’s, and far more vast as well.

"For instance, an ordinary person might see a desk lamp and think of light, then think of a normal lamp, then a hanging lamp, then a ceiling. But it can, in just one second, leap from a desk lamp to an immensely complex mechanism of life.

"And if you ask it to unfold the process by which such associations are formed, you will find that each step seems understandable, yet the complete panorama that emerges is as boundless as the ocean. Even if a human were given days, by their own effort they could only pluck a single spray from that sea.

"In a certain sense, it is like a sage who desires nothing, yet possesses intelligence beyond imagination. But to use it in such a fully expanded form once would cost at least tens of millions."

"...That truly is marvelous."

Jiang Cha'an sighed.

Luo Xing smiled and said,

"Honestly, we think so too.

"Artificial intelligence—though it is a program we ourselves wrote, a direction we ourselves set—once it completes its own learning process, the shape it takes is something we can no longer connect to the original code. The learning process in between is like a black box."

As the two chatted idly, the star points on the display gradually faded.

Finally, when the star points had vanished completely, the interface displayed the results of this AI’s comprehensive calculation.

"Extraordinary potential...

"Data...

"Related event matching...

"...Results confirmed.

"Matched subject.

"No. 1

"Yang Luo.

"Identity number: ...

"Household registration information: ...

"Extraordinary potential: 83.5%.

"No. 2...

"...

"...

"Extraordinary potential: 0.12%

"No. 3

"...

"..."

(End of chapter)